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1.4.1-Shirley-keeldar
Brick!club 1.4.1: Une mère qui rencontre une autre The thing you have to understand about me, and this is as good a time as ever to explain it, is that there is no narrative in the world that will get me quite as verklempt as a parent-child narrative. Or any caretaker-and-child, really. Which means that my preemptive weeping starts in this chapter and basically is never going to end? Last read-through around I was deeply grateful for Waterloo, because that was almost as much of a break as I needed to stop openly weeping in public. See also literally every time Valjean and Cosette are in a scene together, oops. Also, I express emotion turbulence with eccentric and excessive italics. Personal story time over. Over to Montfermeil where Mme Thénardier is swinging her happy little girls on a giant gross chain. How precious. (No, it actually is precious, that’s why it’s awful.) The gross chain being used to entertain children looks like it comes from a prison for cyclopses and superhumans, I’m not crazy if I see a blatant Valjean reference here? I do like that Mme Thénardier is genuinely a devoted mother, but that doesn’t make her a good person and in the long run doesn’t even look like a redeeming quality? It just makes how she treats Cosette worse by comparison? I mean, like I said, I love parent-child narratives, but it’s nice to remember sometimes that loving your own kids doesn’t make you a good person and isn’t this shining force, like, it takes more than just loving your kid. Which is especially good when placed along the central narrative thread of Valjean being redeemed by loving Cosette, who is not his child by blood but becomes his child through his inherent capacity to build emotional bonds? I don’t know where I was going with this. And of course here we pick up with Fantine again. She’s been giving up everything she can so Cosette can have everything. And seriously, Vic Hugo, talk about her hair and teeth some more, why don’t you, no, it’s fine, it’s cool, I wasn’t using that heart anyway?! Seriously, the entire section explaining what Fantine’s been doing since we last saw her is heartbreaking. Like Favourite and the others just melted out of her life — she lost sight of them — and everyone was turning up their noses at Cosette and snarking? Like everyone around Fantine knew what was going on, and it never occurred to any of them to help out in the least tiniest detail? Not point her to somewhere she could get work, not say they had a relative somewhere in the country who might help her out, nothing? Just, poor Fantine. METAPHOR APPRECIATION ALERT Fantine’s pretty lacy wardrobe “disappeared like hoarfrost you take for a diamond in the sun that leaves the branch all black” aaaaah, that is some good imagery. And this line, I can’t even: "Fantine, on le verra, avait la farouche bravoure de vie." (“Fantine, you’ll see, had the fierce bravery of life.”) It is killing me. It will come back to haunt me in that glorious/awful scene where she gives Valjean and Javert a tongue-lashing after being arrested. Rub it in some more with how if Mme Thénardier had been standing and being intimidating none of this would have happened. UGH. STOP IT. Thanks for telling us that Tholomyès is going to be happy and prosperous twenty years later, I really, really needed to know that, why did you tell me that. I hate/love how Cosette goes and plays with Eponine and Azelma all happily. After Mme Thénardier tells them to play nicely. And later she’ll tell them to treat Cosette like dirt and they’ll do that, too. Aaaah. ANYWAY Fantine asks Mme Thénardier to take care of Cosette for her — we get that great meditation on nicknames, but it’s not enough to distract from THE HORROR — and here’s that awful negotiation with Thénardier, it’s so horrible that it only happened because he needed to pay off a debt immediately. AWFUL. Up next: a little bit about these awful people but not too much they’re just TOO AWFUL we need to take this slow Commentary Pilferingapples Just reblogging some GOOD chapter commentary today since my own is so lacking. YAY THANK YOU SMART COMMENTERS TODAY.